Online marketing Blog

I don’t know if I can tell you that there is one set of criteria that I look for. I guess, I have developed a feel for the qualities I think make a good merchant to promote.

Most of it’s simple:

-First commission. What can I make? Is it reasonable to believe I can spend a little and make money? I try and stay above $25 commission; with exceptions… although I do have a lead campaign I make a $1.50 per lead on and have a great ROI… and that’s what matters. Or if it’s a percentage bases, and it’s only 5 or 10%, it must be high ticket items…
-The cookie… probably not super important, but I at least like to see a 30 day…
-Is the site design professional? Would I buy from them?
-What pay options do they offer? Paypal? 2CO? Clickbank?
-How do the testimonials look?
-Are there any awards or anything else that would make this merchant stand out from the pack…

That is important to me… Even if it is a competitive market, I look for things that I can use to make the merchant more tantalizing. Something that makes them stand out from the rest.

And when I say use… I drag a lot from the sales pages into the ad copy. So highlighting something unique is a good thing.

-Endorsements… Quotes from well know news sites or review sites…
-Depending on what I’m doing with it, if I’m going to promote it other than direct, what tools do they offer. How do their banners look? Do the banners look professional…

It really depends on the type of merchant and product. You have to keep in mind the target market for that product. Are they professionals? Housewives? Hungry Entrepreneurs? Who is the market and does this merchants website work for it…

-Of course, is there a demand?… what is that market looking for?
-Is this deliverable? Is it easy? Will people buy this on the net… Downloadable products obviously are on the GREAT side… Grand Pianos… tough. Unless they are unique or rare I suppose.
-And the price has to be easily found. I hate sites that try to hide the cost or request info before you find out…

So really there are a lot of things as far as the site’s design, the professionalism, the testimonials, good looking graphics… sales copy that works for that market.

Like I said, I love merchants, if I’m going to promote via landing pages or other means, that have a LOT of tools and graphics… those are merchants that know what you need. Every marketer has a different need or approach. The more weapons one has to choose from the better…

That all seems like a lot to think about, but it only takes me a few moments to assess those things…

I don’t only look at how much I can make. I look at it from the perspective of the market.

Every market is different. Some will fall for a cheesy sales page… other’s won’t.

-And, sort of along the lines of unique, I always look at new merchants. They may offer a new spin or might have a fresh angle.

The best thing to do as time goes on is analyze the merchants that do convert…

Often you want to try multiple merchants. Do that and look at the merchant that converts. Why? What makes them different?

Adwords is no different than any kind of advertising… You need to spend money first to make money…

You will eventually (no specific timeframe; depends on the person) reach a point of break even and then move beyond.

I base the amount of money I spend on the commission… or should I say the lowest commission. If you can make between $25 and $10,000 then I would spend $25…

UNLESS, I think there are still things I haven’t tried to make it work.

When I first started out using the Google Cash method over a year ago, I spent hundreds of dollars to finally get to my brake even…

I probably spent… trying to remember… $2-300 to get to profitable campaigns. Up to that point I was way in the hole, but then the campaigns started to be profitable (I was making more than I was spending) and that gap closed and I surpassed it and made up for the initial loss.

You WILL get to a point where you will spend less than you make.

Everyone ends up in a different spot:

Might be:

$5000 per month Expenses/$5000 Profit
$250 per month Expenses/$5000 Profit…

Either way you are making the same profit. You will have a cash reserve to pay for your advertising eventually and skim your profit off the top to give yourself a salary.

If I stopped all my experimental campaigns right now I would have a decent residual income. BUT I take a lot of my profits and reinvest it into new campaigns.

In the beginning reinvesting your earnings is essential.

I don’t want to discourage anyone from pursuing this biz. BUT, you may have to spend money before you make money… not always… some I know strike it rich right away by lucking out and finding the gold campaign. Each of our results will be different…

You know what keeps me at it? My successful campaigns. Listen this morning I entered a sale into my handy dandy Campaign Tracker and looked at the ROI of that campaign… 1400%!!! Now that’s what I call a return on investment… Actually I think it’s actually higher; that’s just this month.

That keeps me going.

You know, it’s actually not as hard as it looks.

I own and run several forums.

The first one I downloaded to my desktop, copied into Front Page and uploaded… Did my modifying & added my styles after that.

This one was a few clicks. No downloading or anything… Only because my hosting plan (with myself, lol) has the phpBB software pre-installed. So a few clicks and BOOM! you have a forum. Then it’s just a matter of tweaking.

It uses phpBB open source software. There are tons of mods & styles available. So you can choose from 100s of skins (styles) out there.

The graphics I did myself…. It was a matter of taking part of the banner that was already there and layering…

I added a few links across the top to my Blog and home page just by modifying a file. My Blog is basically installed the same way… pre-installed… but I heavenly modified it by adding the banner across the top, links, adsense and even modified the code to add copyright info to my RSS feeds…

For the Forum Everything else is done via an Admin panel that is really easy to use.

So it’s just a matter of choosing the right styles and modifying it a bit. PHP isn’t too hard to tweak.

There are 100s of things like modules that you can simply add to your forum to make it do this and that. You can add additional security features, styles, smilie paks, and other Ad Ons…

Modifications

There is a Mod Install tool called “EasyMod” that makes installing some of these a snap.

Highly recommend it if you want an easy set up and total control of your universe.

They have a big support community rapped around the software as well:

phpBB Community

Yes, it says 190,000 registered users & 1.5 million posts! I’ve never actually joined, but there is a lot of great help there…

I do this in certain situations when I’m desperate to get into a tight market or don’t have time to be patient and try one at a time. A lot of times I will just do some basic research and set up small niche AdGroups right away… and then if the market works, I’ll either put more niche keywords into their own groups right away OR I’ll put together and test batches of keywords in my Adgroups to sift through and find more niches… etc.

But in this case, when I do, yes I’m basically just testing the market to see if anything will shake out… THEN if I see some good ones worth keeping, I will try and split them off…

Normally this type of test will shake out pretty quick so I don’t lose a lot moving them into separate groups…

There are exceptions. Every campaign is different. If it’s been a long time, I might not want to risk moving them… OR if they are very similar…

BUT I really, really like using keywords in my ads and the tighter the Adgroup the better I can pull the keyword into the ads…

There really is a lot of opportunity out there. Even competitive markets have hidden markets within them like some of you are talking about…

This is an excellent example. I have a market I recently tackled that is really been interesting… It’s about as competitive as the “loan” market… What I ended up doing is just tackling every single niche keyword phrase I found via my research and through them all in and waited…… deleted the disabled… waited… deleted some more disabled… waited, AH! What’s this?

I keyword phrase that has just got me in shock… because it isn’t even that obscure! It’s just a 2 word phrase containing the Market’s main keyword….

I’ve taken that phrase and worked out the misspellings etc… I’m getting clicks ranging from 5 cents to 25 cents (my set max) and positions being clicked ranging from 2 - 60…

Most important thing, I’ve been getting clicks. Not a huge volume per se, but clicks… better than nothing… And I have this one hitting a landing page so it’s just a matter of testing until I find a way to convert. (No, haven’t converted yet, but the payout is BIG and the volume of clicks are small… it may take months to real this one in… or never, lol)

Update: This one is now converting. J

It’s sooooo possible to get into what might seem busy markets…

I’ve got several campaigns running right now in markets that my better judgement would have told me, stay away from, but I’m doing OK.

BUT, As a newbie should you tackle easier, less competitive markets to start with… maybe so. I don’t think I did. I just went mental and tried everything when I started out…

Maybe try to find some easier ones at first until you learn the ropes… It depends on you, your time, and the money situation…

It’s not just about competition either. The ad can pull in clicks in competitive markets as well. The campaign I’m talking about above… why am I getting clicks at an average position of 60 on one of the phrases… is it good copy that draws the click? Maybe so. Something unique? Different?

You may be able to get into a market just by writing better copy than your competition…

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There are so many niches and opportunity out there folks! You just need to hunt.

I’ve seen people talk about being to late to get in and make big money…

I think that’s crazy! There is no way!!

You certainly want to be prepared for the future by diversifing etc, but at the same time live in the present… In the present THERE IS REAL opportunity and markets just waiting…

Something you need to factor in and is rarely discussed is turn over…. Oh yeah!… Markets can be real deceiving…. What if there are 100 people bidding??? Will 95% of them be there in 3 months? Who knows! Will you be?? Will you work on emulating the top ranked merchants… write better sales copy??

The whole thing here is this is a global market place with millions of products to promote and probably billions of keyword combinations… the opportunity is there! And your competition is fluid and ever changing…

New and better merchants and products are coming into play everyday as well. Just a different merchant that your competition doesn’t have can shake things up a bit…

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I’ll leave you with another success story from me:

I found a niche that I was trying out. It was a product I knew nothing about; in fact didn’t know existed and had no idea what it was! I could have ignored it for that reason alone….

BUT, I did some keyword research and sure enough a lot of people were searching…

So I set up the campaign and there were the clicks.

This IS NOT a big campaign… it **is** a nice trickle of income and I will be doing more research and maximizing the potential. This was part of one of my “Campaign Blasts”… I set up a skeleton campaign to see what it might do…

For a market I had no idea about:

# of Clicks…………………….. 105
Click Charges…………………. $5.25
# of Sales……………………… 3
Total $ Sales………………….. $27.69
Profit……………………………. $22.44
ROI……………………………… 474%
CVR…………………………….. 2.86%

(I changed the numbers slightly to deter someone from trying to figure out the product… not that they could, but no chances me take.)

Isn’t that pretty?..

BUT this is a niche that is just sitting there somewhere waiting for you.

I don’t know where this will go long term, but it illustrates what’s possible.

Find one of these, then another, then another… It adds up.

I’ve seen good arguments both ways for using Adsense on product pages. It’s like most everything else in online marketing, you have to test it for yourself. All our markets are different and will react to a page differently.

Honestly if you have a strong product and something the visitor is looking for, I don’t necessarily think that they would click away if you did have them… or the ones that do weren’t going to buy anyway (tire kickers)

At the same time… from my perspective, if I come to a sales page and I see a bunch of Adsense ads surrounding the product, to me I feel the person selling this product or service doesn’t have enough faith in their product… maybe the product is simply their to attract Adsense revenue.

It offers in certain situations a bit of a hedge… something that will off set the cost of the clicks you are sending there. Certainly I would do it in moderation if you actually want to sell the product or promote a specific aff program on that page.

BUT if it is my product, I don’t want to give the visitor an out or distract them… I want that page to be an island and draw them in with some great copy.

Just what I think anyway…

I’m not getting rich, but I have achieved great results never having read Martell or any other SEO strategists work. I have 100s of pages filled with content across numerous sites. A majority of it is content I’ve written, but there is also articles etc that I’ve included that get a share of traffic as well.

And honestly, the results I’ve received are just from basic SEO practices that I use. I’ve never done any hardcore keyword research and optimization on my pages. The traffic I get is incidental to just concentrating on providing good relevant content that people like to link to and that is naturally keyword rich.

Google will pull odd combinations from pages. People search with phrases. Many phrases aren’t in the index so Google does the best they can and display results with pages with those words in them; the phrase itself isn’t there as one unit… it’s spread throughout the page.

I just went to my tracking tool and found a good example. Someone searched for this phrase:

dan mckinney’s marketing material?

This is the Google result that I got a visitor from:

Quick Turn Marketing Exposed by Dan Lok
Dollar Estate Homes” http://www.frank-mckinney.com/ Best-Selling Author, “Make It BIG! “Dan Lok tells you critical marketing facts that…

LOL, Google sure put a mish mash together to give someone a result!

That’s what’s so interesting about all this though. You can optimize a page to death, but sometimes the traffic you get is from random phrase…

Fun!

Some people this is all they do. They design websites that are keyword rich and drive traffic naturally to it…. and rake in the Adsense Income.

And the added bonus to having this approach is you are pretty much immune to Algo Changes…

Regarding: http://www.fxstyle-templates.com/

I needed something as professional as possible for my hosting site (www.iiiHosting.com) that’s why I was willing to buy this. Looking around at other hosting sites, mine at present looks pretty basic. It’s always a good idea to emulate your competitors in your market. Especially in mine because you know people are shopping around.

I did a lot of searching and there are site templates that cost more than this package of 8000….

But the thing I’m seeing with these templates is they are very customizable and it’s actually a lot of the graphics and design that really set them apart.

I mean these are probably some of the best looking sites I’ve seen for real. I’m FREAKING out. I am going to have trouble sleeping.

It is going to be so much easier to put together a professional site for me now. I’ll still modify and tweak them for my purposes, but I’m now way ahead of the game.

The only prob is when you download it, they aren’t labeled. I downloaded the “non-flash version” and there were something like 120 folders I had to open to sift through them… as I was I collected them into categorized and separated them into folders. I saw some I may want to use for current sites I have and future projects!

The download did literally take 2 hours. I don’t know if that’s on my end or not. Being on cable I found that a huge time frame, but there are a lot of graphics including flash.

It’s a sweet deal though.

Search Engines have a little program the send out to websites that “crawl” or “spider” each site picking up information to index in their Search Results. They follow the links you have to your internal pages and to other websites to find that information. Basically their highway is the hyperlink.

You’ll often see Search Results referred to as SERPs which simply is your Search Engine Results Pages.

The program that they send out is called different things the most common is SpiderBot or just Bot or just spider…

You optimize your page with keywords that, through your research, you feel will bring in traffic… You put them throughout your text on the page and inside the code itself in what’s called meta tags… this is simply hidden text that the spiders can get information from. The mainly include the title of your page, description and short keyword list that you want the spiders to index.

The search engines will pick out your keywords using their Bots and bring them back to their computers and index you and give you a rank based on a number of factors.

I just found a keyword niche that according to my keyword tool was searched 41,000 times last month in Overture… There are only 5 ads running in Google for the keyword phrase.

I just set up the adgroup and the “traffic estimator” out of 6 variations says I will get one click per day.

Shall I prove once and for all that the Google estimator is bunk?

…or there is a great disparity between Google and Overture.

11 Hours later…

17 Impressions
2 Clicks

So we are on target to get about 1020 Impressions per month and 120 Clicks per month…

OR 34 Imp per day 4 clicks per day……….

But I have a feeling Google might not be serving it up 100% yet.

That still falls way short of Overture results and that is something I could never understand. Why would people search different on Google than Overture?? Wouldn’t Google results be larger; it’s a larger and more popular engine!? Do they serve a different demographic?

Now wait a minute……………………..

I just went to check quick on which keyword phrase it said would give me that one click AND the results are different!

Before one of the keywords out of 6 was supposed to give me one click per day…

NOW…

Spread between 4 of them they are supposed to get 10.2 per day per the Google Estimator.

Why on earth would it be different than 11 Hours ago………?

WELL, No matter what the difference between Google & Overture, there is another example of why NOT to trust the estimator.

OK, back to ignoring it & stairing at the carpet. The votes are all in… it’s useless bunk junk!